Re: Changing motherboard/CPU - effect on existing Windows XP installation

Parish wrote in
43f3b211$0$3605$ed2e19e4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Martin Underwood wrote:
A customer has asked me to change his motherboard for him so as to
support an Athlon 64 CPU rather than a Pentium IV. I'd like to check
the implications of doing this:

- Presumably because the IDE controller and graphics card are
different, the PC will not boot off the hard disk as it stands; I
can't check at present because I'm waiting for memory and a plug-in
graphics card to replace the graphics controller on the old
motherboard. - If this proves to be the case, what's the best remedy? Is
it
possible simply to boot off a Windows CD and then do a Repair of the
existing installation or will I have to wipe the disk and do a fresh
installation? The PC currently has SP2 and my CD is original Windows
XP (ie pre-SP1): will this cause problems or will it still repair OK
as long as I then upgrade it to SP2?


Doing a Repair (In Place Upgrade) should do the trick but you will
then have to reinstall SP2 and all subsequent patches/hotfixes.


Yes, I'm resigned to probably having to reinstall SP2 and the Windows
Updates.

- Will a change of motherboard, CPU and graphics card (but not hard
disk and CD drive) be sufficient to trigger XP to want to be
activated again? If so, what's the mechanism for getting Windows to
be activated after a change of hardware: do you phone Microsoft and
explain the situation so that they will allow activation to take
place?

If it has a NIC (not on-board LAN) then it shouldn't according to this
site http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm - see "Changing the motherboard"
about 2/3 down the page. the author is a well-respected MS-MVP so the
info should be reliable.

It so happens that both the old and new motherboards have on-board LAN
ports. The old one has on-board graphics where as the new one hasn't and
will need a PCI Express graphics card. The amount of memory will be the same
in both cases (although the new motherboard will have new, faster DIMMs).

Is the article suggesting that if I install a NIC in the PC with the old
motherboard and then connect to the internet, this will force a WPA upgrade
to take place and then if I put the same NIC in the new motherboard, the
fact that it is still present as it was on the old motherboard will give me
the NIC's three votes?

I'm worried about the section on OEM licences and the fact that these are
not transferrable to a new motherboard. How do you tell whether the licence
key is OEM? Does it have "OEM" in the sequence of characters. The licence
key label has the normal 5 groups each of 5 characters, but it does say
"Windows XP Home Edition / IQon Technologies", where IQon is the PC
manufacturer.


.

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